occasionally bombarding the headquarters in an irregular manner

May 15, 2008

life and death in a Mexican mall

I used to subscribe to Stratfor when it was a free service. Now I’m not a subscriber, they send me bits and pieces to try and get me to sign up again, reasonably enough. What this means in practice is that my day is brightened by spam assessing comparatively the assassination techniques of Mexican drug cartels:

Also on May 8, Edgar Guzman Beltran, the son of Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, was killed at 8:50 p.m. local time in Culiacan, Sinaloa state. Guzman Beltran was leaving a local shopping mall with two friends — one of whom was Arturo Meza Cazares, the son of Blanca Margarita Cazares Salazar, reputed to be the cartel’s top money launderer — when the three were caught in a heavy hail of gunfire. Reports from the scene indicate that the team that attacked Guzman Beltran may have involved as many as 40 gunmen from a rival cartel who opened up on the three men with AK-47 rifles and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Other reports put the number of ambushers at around 20. In any event, even 20 men armed with AKs and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher is a significant force, and something one would expect to see in a war zone such as Iraq or Afghanistan rather than in Mexico.

Not exactly what you expect at the Arndale Centre. Let me brighten your day additionally with this assessment of the war between the Sinaloa cartel and the Mexican state.

(more seriously, I can't stop worrying that when we were discussing post 7/7-21/7-Glasgow conspiracy theories, that one of the things that came up was that a potential reason for some of the funny stuff about hydrogen peroxide in the press was that the bad guys had found a new recipe for a liquid explosive and the police didn't want it to get in general circulation. What is this "purple liquid" that girl gangs in Harrow have access to and can totally destroy houses?